All I Want (A Farmers' Market Story) (11 page)

She refused to slouch at the concerned way his eyebrows drew together, refused to look away from the way his eyes studied her, trying to figure her out.

Good luck, buddy.

She’d done a lot to get where she was, but that didn’t mean she had any clue why the warped pieces inside her didn’t fit together like everyone else’s did.

“I’ve got all the time in the world,” he said at last.

And that was a scary prospect.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

C
HARLIE
FOLLOWED
M
EG
around for the rest of the day, learning the ins and outs of goat farming. It was surprisingly precise, though that shouldn’t be a shock. He’d watched Dell and his father farm, and raising things to sell—animals or plants—was nothing if not
precise
.

It was the outcome that never was. Which, aside from his father pointing him away from farming, had been the sticking point for Charlie. He liked results. He liked goals that could be met, ones that couldn’t be swept away by bad weather or animal sickness.

Or your company being bought out.

Neither he nor Meg talked about the kiss as they worked. They pretended it had never happened. As though it hadn’t crawled inside him and flipped everything upside down.

Because he hadn’t been lying about wishing he hadn’t. Not remembering was actually much better than
remembering
. Like wishing he’d never known her name. Because now that he knew—knew that it felt like no kiss had
ever
felt before—the last thing he wanted to do was stop or be reasonable.

But she seemed to need it. There’d been a crack in her usual affable armor. He’d seen maybe a glimpse of it at the bar that night, but he’d been drowning in his own problems, and a metric ton of alcohol.

Since then, she’d been nothing but strong and determined, and even in the moments of confusion and argument, she had been cool. Collected.

But then she’d called herself a mistake. She’d all but begged him to let her go when he hadn’t exactly been holding her against her will and, well, now he didn’t know what to do. Except tread carefully and do as she asked. Try to remember his
plan
. A plan would make everything better.

If the goal was to get her to marry him in the next eight months, which wasn’t
that
crazy as he seemed to like her more and more, and he was definitely attracted to her, which was important, he had to be careful. Pushing would screw it up and so would losing his head.

He
was
the responsible one. No rebellious past, though she still hadn’t shared the full details there. He might not have a job, but his prospects were far more solid and dependable than hers.

Meg was locking the barn up, the sun setting off to the west making her hair glow. She really was beautiful. It had been the first thing he’d thought when he laid eyes on her at the market. This woman babbling about goat milk soap was quite possibly the most beautiful woman who’d ever smiled at him.

“You hold up pretty well, Wainwright,” she said, trying to hide a yawn with the back of her arm. “It’s like you grew up on a farm or something.”

“Funny how the shit and the hay never really leave you.”

“Don’t forget about the bone-deep satisfaction.”

“Yeah, I never got that part.” Of course, he’d never been allowed to try. Not that it bothered him. He’d never felt it the way Dell had. Maybe if he had... He wasn’t sure how to finish that sentence, actually.

“How about I buy you dinner at Moonrise?” he asked.

“You know, people are going to start talking,” Meg returned as they walked, her face turned away from him so he couldn’t see her expression or decipher the out-of-place note in her voice.

“Well, they’ll talk a lot more when it becomes obvious you’re pregnant.”

“It won’t bother you that the New Benton gossip mill will be whispering ‘Goat Girl is pregnant and she’s been spending an awful lot of time with that upstanding Wainwright boy’?”

He stopped midstride because he hadn’t really thought about that. That was exactly what the women at his parents’ church would whisper to each other, and certainly purposefully loud enough for his parents to overhear. Because Mom had bragged endlessly about his success, and Dad had probably been worse.

Yeah, he really hadn’t thought of that.

“Wow, you went a little pale. Sorry. Figured you already assumed.”

“No, I hadn’t. In fact, I only just came to the realization that I have to tell my family.”

It was her turn to grow pale, and she looked at him with those lost, wide eyes that he thought truly might end up haunting him someday.

“Family,” she whispered solemnly, as though he’d chanted some ancient curse that would send them all to purgatory.

“Well, that’s what we’ll do,” he said resolutely, making the decision quickly. He wouldn’t spring it on his family yet, but it was time they at least got acquainted with the idea of Meg.

“Wait—what?”

“We’ll go have dinner at my family’s house.”

She took a big step away from him. “Oh no. No.”

“We won’t tell them about the baby yet. Even married couples tend to wait until the first trimester is over. But this way they can meet you, and...”

“And you can give them the impression this wasn’t a drunk hookup with Goat Girl?”

He frowned. That wasn’t what he’d been thinking. Not exactly. “Don’t you think it’s better to meet each other’s family and at least get somewhat acquainted before we say, ‘Hey, guess what, your next grandchild is on the way and parented by this random stranger!’”

Meg blew out a breath. “No. No. A million times no. You’re not meeting my family.”

She said it with such finality his jaw dropped. “Ever?” She was...what? Embarrassed of
him
? “You think they won’t like me?”

She laughed, a very sharp kind of laugh with bitter edges. “They’d love you. God, they’d love every last inch of you.” She sobered, and her eyes were suspiciously shiny, and Charlie had to wonder if hormones were at play, because this made no sense to him.

She cleared her throat. “I don’t have much interaction with them. They wouldn’t let me into my grandmother’s funeral. We’re not close. I’m not even sure I’ll tell them.”

“You won’t tell them you’re having a kid? Their grandchild?”

She hugged herself then and turned her back to him, beginning to take long, quick strides toward the house. “I...don’t know,” she said, every syllable of each word wrapped in pain.

He felt it like his own. Which was new. He tended to be able to look at other people’s problems fairly rationally and unemotionally. He was a fixer, and sure, he did want to fix this, this pain, this hurt. But he also wanted to protect her from the people who’d hurt her, to find them and hurt them back. This feeling must have to do with the fact that she was carrying his child. A protectiveness-by-proxy type of thing.

She stepped into the house and he followed, wanting to soothe the tension wrapped around her shoulders, visible in the way she still hugged herself tight.

He wanted to be the one doing the hugging.

Very, very out of the ordinary, and if things weren’t
so
out of the ordinary that he was secretly waging a campaign for marriage and stability, he would have ignored it. But a partner, a husband, a coparent was someone who would act on that obvious need for comfort.

Which was very confusing, all in all. Wanting to, but not wanting to, but thinking it was the right thing to do.

He felt scrambled, and he wasn’t used to that either. So it seemed like a good plan of action to reach out and touch her shoulders, to gently guide her into the circle of his arms and patiently, platonically, hug her.

She was still stiff, but incrementally she fell against him. She softened. She leaned. A warmth he’d never experienced before bloomed at the center of his chest. Because for as much as Charlie led and made the right choices, people didn’t...lean on him. People didn’t accept comfort
from
him. No one had ever looked to him for that.

He was often viewed as too hard, too contained, too condescending for
comfort
—the giving or receiving of it. He’d always thought that was a good way to be. So no one ever looked at him and thought of him as
weak
or
wrong
.

But if he’d missed out on this, this warmth and comfort and
goodness
, well, he really had been missing out.

She sighed against his chest, and he rubbed his palm up and down her back.

“I hadn’t really thought about it either,” she said at long length. “Telling my family. They’re not a part of my life.” One of her hands slid between them, resting over her stomach, her knuckles brushing right above the fly of his jeans.

Which took warm comfort to a different place in his head, and he had to concentrate very hard on her words and not on the proximity of her hand to his crotch.

“I don’t think I want Seedling to know them.”

“Are they really that awful?”

She tipped her head back, searching his face for something, and if he knew what she was searching for, he’d find a way to offer it. Which was also an odd feeling, because very rarely did he offer things purely for the sake of the other person.

“Maybe you wouldn’t think so,” she said in a quiet voice, so incongruous to the woman with the bright smiles and easy, joking manner. “But they made a practice out of making me feel unworthy, like I was nobody. I will protect my child from that with everything I am.”

He pressed his palm to her cheek, wishing he knew more, understood more. Wishing they had gone about this the
right
way instead of the drunken one-night stand, to pregnancy, to finally getting to know each other way.

“Then of course I think they’re terrible.”

“Even if you would’ve agreed with them, that I’m unworthy? That there’s something wrong with me? I broke all their rules, I acted out, I covered my body in tattoos, as brightly as I possibly could, in defiance, all so they’d forever have to look at me and be reminded of the
bad choices
I’d made.”

He rubbed a palm down the length of her arm, her sky, her sun, the little birds in the distance of this big picture of...peace, he realized. She’d been searching for peace. And sunshine. Light. She’d put it on her skin, where she could keep it forever.

“How old were you?”

“Old?”

“Age. It matters. How old were you when you did all this stuff? Defied your parents. Acted out. Were you a dumb teenager? Or was it last year?”

She pressed her lips together, but they curved as though trying to push away a smile.

“Charlie, I need you to do something.”

“Anything.” And that was true.

“I need you to forget everything we said this morning about ignoring the attraction, about doing what’s best for Seedling, and I need—let me repeat that—I
need
you to kiss me.”

There was some glimmer of rational Charlie, somewhere deep, deep down, telling him not to. He heard it dimly, beneath the steady pounding of his heart, beneath the sea of
want
her words—her need—unleashed in him.

Then her mouth was on his and that voice was thoroughly silenced.

* * *

H
ER
FAMILY
HAD
always made her feel reckless. Reckless and edgy and needy. They turned her into a mess of a girl, even far away, even as an adult.

She’d send them a thank-you note if Charlie kept kissing her like she was the air he needed to breathe, touching her like everything about her was
necessary
.

The opposite of wrong and unworthy. Definitely not a nobody. She felt
right
, she felt endlessly
deserving
of his attention, and oh, he made her feel like a somebody. Yes, his kiss reached in, did all of those things, and she wanted more.

She
needed
more. Like a drug, like a drink. She was already living with the consequences of one unprotected, drunken hookup; she might as well have a sober, fill-her-up-with-light-and-worth hookup.

She could feel him pulling away, probably coming to his senses, but she wasn’t ready for that. So she dipped her hands under his shirt, grazed her fingertips around the waistband of his pants. Skin to skin, the reminder or knowledge that despite being very
businesslike
, his body was hard.
Honed.

No matter how she tried, she couldn’t remember what it had been like. To touch him, to kiss him, to be with him. “What do you remember about that night?” she asked, trailing her fingers up his chest, the warmth of his body heat enveloping her arms in the cocoon of his shirt.

“I think I remember you had a birthmark.” His eyebrows puzzled together, like he wasn’t certain of the memory at first. But then his gaze homed onto her chest, exactly where the small brown splotch hid beneath her shirt.

He dipped his index finger under the hem of her shirt and dragged the material upward, trailing the point of his finger up the center of her stomach, then chest.

“Right...there,” he said when it was finally visible.

One fingertip, a gentle graze, and she thought she might vibrate until she fell apart. She understood what he meant now, after the kiss this morning. Because wanting to remember had been driving her crazy, but she was beginning to think knowing might actually be worse.

In the best possible way.

“I guess that’s something,” she said.

“And,” he continued, his voice low and smooth, “I remember that you smelled like your soap. The owl one.”

“That’s lemon verbena.”

His mouth curved, and she thought that could be her new addiction. To watch his lips take that slow, meaningful upward curve. Never a flash, never a grin, just an easy slide into a smile.

“Right. Lemon verbena.” His finger was still holding her shirt up, the tip of it pressed against the small birthmark.

Everything centered there. Her heartbeat, the shivering feeling under her skin, the heat. All of it pulsing where his one fingertip pressed, and she could hardly get in a decent breath, or let out one. Because everything had shrunk down to this.

One by one, the rest of his fingertips touched down just below her breast, and he used both hands to pull the shirt over her head. He slid his fingertips down her arms, then up her sides, and his eyes drank her in as if every inch of her mattered.

Something inside her shook at that, but she ignored it and stepped closer to him, taking his shirt off exactly the same way he’d removed hers—letting her fingertips graze as much of his skin as she could, taking her time over the dips and ridges of muscle. Slow. Deliberate.